The Great Gatsby

  This year flew by so fast. I can remember the day I walked into AP Language class and Mrs. Kirkman started a lesson right away. In my mind I knew that AP Language class was going to be a long and hard year. Surprisingly this year flew by and every moment I stepped into room 403, I was ready to start the lesson. Mrs.Kirkman you made the class fun and entertaining. My favorite piece that we have read this year is The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby was my favorite, because it was a book where it did not involve logical fallacies, grammar, and sentence structures. It was a time where us students got to sit down and enjoy a wonderful book, which involved money, love, and lots of drama. I loved this piece because it took place in the jazz era and we got to see what different types of clothes men and women wore. The blogs that you provided were interesting and the blogs we had to write about were fun. One blog post that we had to do pertaining to the book was where you gave us a list of 1920's attire, jazz music, eighteenth amendment, nineteenth amendment, stock market, or the rise of mafia/mob, was a fun and entertaining blog post to write. My all time favorite blog post that we have ever done was creating our own Gatsby themed party. That post was extremely fun to write because our budget was unlimited. It was also interesting to see what my friends had to write about that topic too. The Great Gatsby book was thrilling yet interesting to read. It had suspense, drama, and quite a few surprises. It was my favorite because those few weeks that we had a chance to read the book were fun, and the blogs that came with it were interesting topics to write about.

The Amazon Rainforest!

  Nature is a place where one goes for the beauty and to have an experience with the wildlife. If I had the chance to go into the wild, I would gladly go to the Amazon. Why the Amazon? Through pictures and stories that I have heard from Lily and read online, the Amazon seems like a place I would love to visit. Amazon has a beautiful forest and trees that reach high at 200 feet. The Amazon is a home to as many as 80,000 plant species from which than 40,000 species play a critical role in regulating the global climate and sustaining the local water cycle. The rare plants that grow in the Amazon rainforest are the orchid hunting, mangroves, Ecuadorian Rainforest Flower, and Rafflesia Flower. The Amazon rainforest has dangerous animals that humans should be careful of. During my trip to the rainforest I would love to see some exquisite animals that I can hold and analyze their behaviors in the rainforest. The animals that are in this rainforest are spider monkey, golden lion tamarin, sloth, giant anteater, giant river otter, capybara, Amazonian mantee, toucan, maca, Amazon pink river dolphin, electric eel, piranha, black caiman, anaconda, jaguar, poison arrow frog, and much more. Well of course some of these animals are extremely dangerous to be close to them, but that is why I will love to take many experts with me who have visited the Amazon rainforest and are familiar with their surroundings. I would like to go the Amazon around three weeks so I can grasp everything I see and learn how unique this rainforest is.

New Brain Disease

“For concussion sufferers, a brain scan may warn it’s time to call it quits”

By: Melissa Healy

Source: LA Times

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-concussion-test-encephalopathy-20150406-story.html

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is the constellation of cognitive and psychiatric symptoms that appear to result from repeated blows to the head. Not one person has the correct diagnosis of this disease.  The disease itself still needs a work in progress, and the abnormal protein tangles throughout the brain. The only people that have been diagnosed with this kind of disease are former athletes who have dies in various states of dementia, or by suicide. Research has been done, and disease can be diagnosed now if one is living. With early detection patients can take steps to protect their brains from further injuries. By going through many steps, and scanning doctors can see how far this disease has spread. This disease is abnormal proteins are deposited in the brain that is usually seen in Alzheimer’s disease and motor neuron disease. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans former fourteen football players and it reveals patterns in the brain that ranged from localized to extensive. The locations and extent of these abnormalities are seen to track with the severity of those retired athletes symptoms of depression, anxiety and intellectual impairment. The retired football players ranged in ages from forty to eighty-six. Protein clumps can be found in the brainstem and the amygdala, which is a walnut shaped structure deep in the brain that is key in processing strong emotions. There are more tests yet to be conducting on this new research that was found in the brain of football players, and what was the cause of it. The article is important for people to read because it shows what can happen to the brain if one cannot be careful, especially football players. 

3-D Printer

New 'Molecule-Making Machine' Could Speed The Development Of Life-Saving Drugs

By: Macrina Cooper-White

Source: Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/14/3d-print-molecules-machine-drugs_n_6864636.html?utm_hp_ref=science

  3-D printing is the new invention that everyone is talking about. 3-D printing is not just ant original printer; it prints anything one would want in 3-D. Thanks to 3-D printing it is now possible to print from pizza to prosthetics to human organs with just a push of a button. 3-D printing works on the atomic scale, it assembles complex molecules from scratch. This machine can revolutionize the drug- development process. Dr.Martin D.Burke, a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois said, “We’re really excited about the immediate impacts that this will have on drug discovery.” This 3-D printer can synthesize small molecules, which requires a step-by-step series of chemical reactions. The process is time consuming and requires someone with a lot of expertise. The new printer simplifies the molecule-making process and makes it accessible to non-chemists. When one puts power into technology a tremendous impact will make history. Dr.Martin D.Burke also said, “A 3-D printer for molecules could allow us to harness all the creativity, innovation, and outside-the-box thinking that comes when non-experts start to use technology that used to only be in the hands of a select few.” To create such a machine like this Dr. Brooke and his collaborators analyzed thousands of molecules and identified the chemical building blocks. The 3-D printer snaps these building blocks together like LEGOs and then washed away byproducts. This printer is capable of building fourteen classes of small molecules, and the researchers hope to develop the technology to the point that is can assemble almost any kind of small molecule. This article is important because it shows how important a 3-D printer can be and how useful it will once it works properly.   

Gender Equality

  In our society today men and women still discuss the issue if women are equal to men. Some men think that women should stay home, cook, clean, be a hostess, and take care of the children. This is the twenty-first century and women can work, clean, go to school, and also take care of the children. In marriages they also do have equal rights for money, and children.  In today’s society men and women have equal rights under certain circumstances. Men and women are equal in politics. Women can vote, run for office, serve in the Senate and the House of representatives, and vote on legislation. Women are powerful in politics and have equal say and vote on what needs to be passed. In jobs, women and men do not have equal rights. An example can be if a women or a man is running for CEO at a top business firm, a man would most likely be able to get the job. Women feel like it is important to have equal rights for jobs because women can run company as well as a man can. Women still have equal rights in theory, but there is still discrimination. Society slowly does accept women in different situations, like work. No matter what men will always have the upper hand because they are the strong ones and the head of the house. Women now have taken over and do the same, maybe in a few years men and women will have equal rights because society enforces equality in men and women. 

President Obama's Speech In Selma

“In Selma, a chance to hear a president and be part of history”

By: Ann M. Simmons

Source: LA Times

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-selma-speech-20150307-story.html

  President Obama spoke in front of thousands of people at the Edmund Pettus Bridge; a site of violence and bitterness had become one peace and triumph. Everyone was inspired and president Obama had recognized and included his race and all other races in his speech. “ Fifty years from ‘Bloody Sunday’, our march is not yet finished, but we’re getting closer. Two hundred and thirty nine-years after the nations founding, our union is not yet perfect, but we are getting closer. Our job’s easier because somebody already got us through that first mile. Somebody already got us through that first mile. Somebody already got us over that bridge” quoted Obama (Simmons, 1). George Holmes a retired Department Corrections worker said he was eighteen years old in March 1965 and did not participate in the Bloody Sunday march, but he did take part in the demonstrations in his hometown of Birmingham. On Saturday it was the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. President Obama was there to give a wide-ranging speech that mentioned diverse characters of Susan B. Anthony, James Baldwin, Lewis and Clark, and more. People In the crowd loved Obama’s speech and it affected the audience emotionally. Obama had said appropriate things and stated true facts about racial discrimination. Students also attended this ceremony and caught a glimpse of how this day is important and what it means for the others who were affected by discrimination. Obama’s speech in Selma was powerful and emotional; no one will forget this memorable day.  

The Daily Show

  When Malaysia airlines went missing The Daily Show antagonized how awful these news reports are saying about the airline going missing. Jon Stewart uses satirical techniques in his set. He criticizes how CNN and Fox news are not even talking about the airline going missing, how the airline went missing, and what may have caused the airplane to go missing. All CNN and Fox are talking about are black holes and the Bermuda Triangle. What these newscasts are talking about has nothing to do with the topic and it does not even relate to Flight 370 disappearing. CNN also had a whole new segment about how airplanes are built and how many inches the airplanes are. Jon is irritated about this and is making fun of them because he does not understand why they are not talking about the important topic. These newscasts do not even want to inform, all they want to do is scare people. Jon in his show uses exaggeration, incongruity, and parody. This is effective because people do actually see what newscasts do to actually waste time on the air. Instead of talking about the importance of the topic, they talk about unrelated topics. CNN thinks that this airplane has been lost in a “black hole”, or did not survive the flight through the “Bermuda Triangle”. Jon does actually show frustration because he does not understand what these people in the newscast say. He wants these newscasts to be real and to the point. He does not like how they are not talking about the real problem.